There is nothing like new potatoes lightly coated with creme fraiche and liberally sprinkled with fresh dill and it’s even better with buttery yellow beans fresh from the garden or your local farmers market. It’s one of my favourite summer dishes.

I steam the potatoes whole and unpeeled, cook the beans separately in salted water (sometime in the water I steamed the potatoes in) and then combine them in a pot with either homemade or store bought creme fraiche, a liberal sprinkling of fresh dill and good salt.

I served this with a plate of thickly sliced plump, red, vine ripened tomatoes that were so sweet and juicy it made me wonder why we ever eat tomatoes any other time of the year.

A couple of interesting desserts were also happening in my kitchen this week, the problem is getting to photograph them so that I can post the recipes on the blog. This week it’s been semifreddo, one honey-lemon and one coffee flavoured. I have some leftovers in the freezer and will try to get them photographed soon.

In the meantime, enjoy.

New potatoes and yellow beans with creme fraiche and dill

Ingredients:

1 lb new potatoes, unpeeled

1 lb fresh yellow beans

1/2 to 1 cup creme fraiche, homemade or store bought

Salt and pepper

Plenty of chopped fresh dill

Directions:

Steam the potatoes whole in a pot with a steamer basket, covered, until easily pierced with the tip of a knife.

When done remove to a bowl and sprinkle with salt and some dill.

Trim the beams only on the stem end then cut in half.

Cook the beans in boiling salted water (you can use the potato water if it is clean).. When the beans are crisp tender remove from heat and drain.

Combine beans and potatoes back in the pot over low heat and pour the creme fraiche over. Gently toss to coat the potatoes and beans with the creme fraiche.

Add plenty of dill and toss gently to distribute the dill throughout.

Add salt and pepper if you like pepper.

Remove from heat and serve immediately.

Enjoy.

Homemade creme fraiche:

1/4 cup sour cream or buttermilk
2 cups whipping cream

Combine sour cream or buttermilk and whipping cream in a mason jar, mix until well combine.

Cover with plastic wrap and poke holes in the plastic to allow air to circulate.

Let rest on the counter for 12-24 h.

Once ready and thickened cover jar with the lid and keep refrigerated.

A beautiful ripe avocado is a special treat and once in a while I indulge. You have to buy it just right, either to serve immediately or to ripen on your counter for a day or two before serving. I have thrown away many avocados that I bought with good intentions and never got around to using. Once they go soft there is nothing to do but discard them.

The softness of the avocado is offset by the crunchy dukkah. Dukkah is a Middle Eastern blend of nut, seed and spice with a crunchy texture and complex nutty flavours. You can buy it prepared but there is nothing to making it and you can keep a jar of it in the fridge or freezer for when you need it. I have a similar versions on the here.

I made it before with goat cheese mousse made by combining goat cheese and partially whipped cream to lighten it (I piped it around the plate), but this time I opted for just crumbling goat cheese over.

The recipe was inspired by Avocado and Labneh salad in Salads for Presidents: A Cookbook Inspired by Artists.

Here is an easy summer dessert that uses the beautiful seasonal berries. I macerated the berries with a little sugar and ice wine (or dessert wine) top them with ice cream and whipped cream, then cover it all with meringue shards that add an element of surprise (you cannot see what’s under) and a crunch factor to this refreshing, simple dessert.

I had an opportunity to cook for visiting friends in the last couple of weeks and it allowed me to make a few different desserts. Some of them will make it to the blog sooner or later.

Other than that our strange season this year is keeping us under a layer of yellow smoke and we often have to keep the doors to the patio closed to keep the smoky air out.

It’s still fun to hang out on the rooftop patio though and look at all the flowers, vegetables and herbs I have growing. The tomatoes are just beginning to turn red and I look forward to use them with the basil growing in abundance among the other plants.

I am also working on our next travel adventure, this time Australia and New Zealand for the winter (their summer) and I am excited about the experiences I am planning for the trip. After my addiction to Masterchef Australia, this is a fitting destination. If you have any suggestions for either of these destinations I would love to hear from you.

Berries, ice cream and meringue shards

Ingredients:

Meringue:

2 egg whites
10 tablespoon sugar

Berries:

3 cups mixed berries
1 tablespoon sugar
2 tablespoons dessert wine

Vanilla ice cream as needed

Powdered sugar for dusting

Directions:

Meringue:

Whisk the egg whites in an electric mixer until soft peaks form.

Begin adding the sugar gradually until stiff peaks form but don’t let the meringue dry.

Spread the meringue on a baking sheet lined with parchment, spreading it thinly and evenly.

Bake at 200ºF until the meringue is dry. It should remain white.

Remove from oven and let cool, then break into shards.

Berries:

Combine berries with sugar and dessert wine and set aside to macerate.

On my last trip to the local farm stands a few blocks behind where we live I picked a whole bunch of beautiful new and local produce. Small new potatoes, plump green onions, field cucumbers and these small sweet bunches of red and yellow beets. Normally I would roast them but I recently bought a new gadget for the kitchen, a sous vide immersion circulator, and decided to cook the beets sous vide.

If the sous vide revolution past you by, here is a little information about it. Sous vide is a French term meaning “under vacuum”. What it means in the kitchen is cooking food sealed in food grade plastic bags in a circulating water bath that maintains a precise temperature for the entire cooking process. It’s not a fast cook, but it is precise.

Restaurants have been using sous vide machines for decades after a French chef enlisted a scientist in 1974 to develop a method for precision cooking at his restaurants. Before that sous vide machines were used in industries and scientific labs where precision temperatures were needed.

Recently the sous vide made the leap from commercial kitchens to home use and a few products were developed that are convenient and safe to use at home.

Beets sous vide

To give it a try I decided to buy an immersion sous vide circulator rather than the larger appliance since space is always tight in my over-full kitchen and pantry. I decided to buy the Anova brand and see what sous vide cooking is all about. The Anova comes with a phone app and I can control the cooking from my phone.

My first impression of the sous vide was that it is primarily intended for meat, fish and seafood but I read that it cooks vegetables quite well and this is what made me curious. It kind of makes sense that if you seal the food as it cooks you wouldn’t lose any flavour or nutrients to the cooking water.

Together with the sous vide I bought a sealer and food-grade bags to cook the food in. After a couple of trials I managed to get set up and ready to cook.

The first thing I tried was beets and I must say they turned out quite special. The beets had perfect texture and the flavour was much like what you get when roasting beets: sweet, deep concentrated flavour that you would never get from boiling them.

I am going to keep experimenting with this gadget and will let you know how I do. So far so good.

I cooked the beets in two separate bags, one for the red, one for the golden beets, and made them into two separate salads so the colours don’t run. Served with goat cheese or gorgonzola and a few candied nuts scattered on top it made a delicious and colourful salad.

If you don’t have a sous vide of course you can roast the beets with equally good results.

We are lucky in the Okanagan to have winery restaurant chefs that pride themselves on creating dishes using local produce that are beautiful to look at and packed with flavour. One of my favourite is the Terrace Restaurant at Mission Hill winery. Not only the Tuscan architecture, the bell tower, the view and the beautiful wines, but the food at their Terrace restaurant is always outstanding.

My gal friends were visiting from Calgary last week and of course I booked a dinner for 4 at the Terrace as part of the Okanagan experience I prepared for them. This restaurant and its beautiful setting represents some of the best of what the Okanagan has to offer.

By chance we were seated at the owner Anthony von Mendl favourite table at the far end of the terrace, where you get a broad view of the property and can keep an eye on the coming and going at the winery.

As I expected, we enjoyed a beautiful dinner as the bell on the tower rang much like it does in any Tuscan town and the sun slowly set in spectacular reds and pinks, painting the sky over the Okanagan lake.

My first course was an heirloom tomato salad with fresh ricotta cheese drizzled with Tuscan olive oil, purple shiso and charcoal sourdough. It was a perfectly portioned first course with sweet, salty and tangy flavours, and creamy and crispy texture from the cheese and bread.

I thought I’d create a version for dinner tonight but made the portion more substantial and used a few varieties of tomatoes that I had on hand. I didn’t have shiso so replaced with red and green basil and wasn’t sure about the charcoal sourdough bread crisp so just made plain bread crisp from a french baguette. I did make the fresh ricotta especially for this salad and it was creamy and velvety, perfect with the sweet and tangy tomatoes.

It was a beautiful salad and I thought blog worthy so here it is.

Heirloom tomato salad with homemade ricotta

Ingredients:

2-3 cups variety of heirloom tomatoes

Olive oil

Salt and pepper

Red and green basil leaves

Homemade ricotta (see below)

Very thinly sliced french baguette

Directions:

Slice the tomatoes in halves or quarters, depending on their size and shape, and place in a bowl.

Drizzle with olive oil and sprinkle with salt and pepper.

Shred the larger basil leaves and add to the tomatoes, keeping a few of the smaller leaves for garnish.

To plate spoon the tomatoes on one half of a shallow salad bowl and spoon the ricotta next to it.

Lentils are versatile and I use them all year, for soups and stews in the winter and salads in the summer. I often have cooked lentils in the fridge to pull out on the spur of the moment to make a lunch or dinner salad.

In this salad I used leftover beets and carrots from my new sous vide experiment, more on that later, but you can make this without a sous vide by boiling or roasting the vegetables which will be just fine.

I used the lentils as the base and layered the vegetables and salad leaves on top. Freshness from the herbs and salad, fruitiness and pungency from a good olive oil, a little crunch from the walnuts, sweetness from balsamic crema and acidity from a squirt of lemon made this dish quite flavourful, hitting all the flavour notes on your palate.

In keeping with our Okanagan summer rituals, we enjoyed it at the table on our leafy and floral “Italian garden” side of our rooftop patio with Ottmar Liebert guitar music in the background and a small glass of good wine. No complains from anyone here.

I am happy to share. Enjoy.

Lentil salad with beets and carrots

Ingredients:

1 cup French lentils, rinsed and sorted if needed
A couple of sprigs of herbs: thyme, rosemary, oregano

Arugula and baby greens as available
Olive oil
Balsamic crema
Salt and pepper

Garnishes: edible flowers or herb flowers

Directions:

Lentils:

Place lentils in a pot, cover with cold water by about an inch, add the herb sprigs and bring to a boil. Lower heat and cook, partially covered, until lentils are done. If necessary, add water to make sure the lentils do not dry up. When ready drain in a colander, remove herb springs, then place in a glass bowl and set aside.

Carrots and beets:

Cook the carrots and beets separately, either in boiling water or roast them in the oven until just done. Remove and let cool in separate bowls. Peel the beets and cut into 4 or 6 wedges. Drizzle a little olive oil, salt and pepper over both vegetables and drizzle a little balsamic crema over the beets only. Set aside.

Assembling:

Add the shallot, olive oil, lemon juice, zest, salt and pepper, cilantro and walnuts and walnut oil to the lentils and mix gently to combine.

Pile the lentils into the serving dishes.

Arrange the carrots and beets over the lentils.

Place arugula and other greens in a bowl, f=drizzle with olive oil and a little balsamic crema, salt and pepper and toss gently. Pile the greens over the lentils and vegetable in a way that gives the dish height.

So it never rains it pours. Haven’t made desserts in a while and now that’s all I want to do. Go figure. Some will make it to this blog if the images work out.

This cake is easy to make and requires only two bowls (one for dry and one for wet ingredients) and a whisk, no mixer necessary. My kind of cooking as I am not a fan of using too many dishes. Now, there is a catch, if you want to present it as I did in the pics it will take more work but I only served it this way once, the rest of the cake we enjoyed with a dollop of whipped cream and the lemon sauce.

To make things even easier you can buy lemon curd at the store and mix it into whipped cream and use that as the sauce. Easy is often best.

The pink crumb (aka “soil”) you see in the image is something I had on hand from another dessert (lemon semifreddo, coming up) and I incorporated it into this dessert because it was there, but it’s not necessary. The pink colour comes from freeze dried berries that I sourced online after reading about them in some recipes. This week is the first time I am using them and it promises to be quite fun. I bought freeze dried strawberries and blueberries that I process to a powder or fine crumb in the food processor and then mix with the dessert “soil”. I should probably do a post about “soil”. Any interest out there? Let me know.

Smoke is still hanging over the valley from the more than 200 fires throughout BC and I am sad to think of people who lost their homes or have been evacuated. What a season it’s been this year, floods, fires, wind. What next? It affects everything. Having lost our beloved home to fire I have a unique understanding of what these people are going through.

So, here is the recipe for this simple but delicious lemon mint cake to sweeten your day.

Matcha became trendy a few years ago as a drink and soon found its way into modern cooking. Matcha is green tea leaves ground to a powder and there is a ceremonial ritual to follow when making an authentic version of the drink.

When it comes to cooking with it matcha has a sweet, slightly smoky and nutty quality and a lovely green colour. You control the shade of green by the amount of matcha powder you add to the recipe.

I adapted a recipe for matcha cupcakes to create individual rectangular cakes baked in a silicon mold. You can play with the shape and presentation to suit yourself.

In terms of composing a dessert, modern dessert plating has four basic elements:

One of the culinary treasures of southern Italy (Puglia) is the burrata: a creamy, perishable cheese that is shipped daily to vendors and restaurants in other parts of the country to be consumed the same day.

Burrata means “buttered” and in the categories of cheeses it is not a mozzarella, nor a mozzarella di bufala, although it is made with buffalo milk. To make burrata cheesemakers fill a thin skin of mozzarella with a mixture of cream and curds and stretch it over the filling into a bundle tied with a knot to contain the filling. When you cut into a piece of burrata the filling spills out soft and creamy and the skin is light and thin, not chewy (chewy means the cheese is not as fresh).

Burrata, French beans, asparagus and herbs

If you don’t have access to burrata you can make this salad with soft mozzarella di buffala or fiore di latte (made with cow’s milk). Mozzarella is made mostly in the Campania region of Italy (also in Puglia and southern Lazio). Artisan cheesemakers use traditional methods to curdle the milk, then drain and boil the curds until they reach a perfect texture. Cheesemakers knead the curds in wooden vats until smooth and elastic and then single portions of cheese are squeezed between thumb and forefinger to create the balls of cheese we buy, submerged in the milky liquid used for the curdling.

Asparagus and beans salad with fiore di latte

Here is a way to serve beautiful spring vegetables with great Italian burrata or fresh mozzarella if you have it. The recipe was inspired by the NYT Cooking recipe for Burrata with fava beans, fennel and celery. I didn’t have burrata and used fiore di latte from our local Italian store, although burrata would have been my first choice.

Ingredients:

1 lb asparagus

1/2 lb slender green beans

1/4 cup olive oil

Juice of 1 small lemon

Salt and pepper

Micro greens and fresh herbs for garnish

Burrata or soft, fresh mozzarella

Directions:

Cut the asparagus and beans on the diagonal into equal size pieces.

Bring a pot of salted water to a boil.

Drop the asparagus into the boiling water and cook until barely tender. Plunge into ice bath to stop the cooking, then drain.

Repeat the with green beans.

Drizzle the beans with the olive oil and lemon juice.

Sprinkle generously with salt and pepper and mix to distribute.

Arrange the vegetables on a plate and place the burrata in the center.